Phil DeFreitas took 140 Test wickets. He was part of an Ashes-winning team at the age of 20. Between 1991 and 1994 he was England's best fast bowler. He won a Test at Adelaide in 1995 with a glorious counter-attacking 88. He even had a trademark comic grimace every time he bowled that made him look like a man in the throes of a painful orgasm.

None of these define DeFreitas's career. Instead, harsh though it is, he is remembered as the man who lost the Ashes after one ball. That was in the first Test at Brisbane in 1994-95. England had travelled Down Under with genuine optimism after a thrilling drawn series against South Africa (who had themselves drawn home and away against Australia the previous winter). It didn't take long for their hopes to unravel. DeFreitas kicked off the series with a nervous long hop that was crashed witheringly for four by Michael Slater. The last ball of the over suffered the same treatment. The tone of Australian hegemony was set, and they romped to 329 for four at the close - standard fare these days, but revelatory at the time; only five years earlier they had closed the first day of the Ashes series on 207 for three - and eventually to a 3-1 victory.

It was a bad ball, but no worse than most looseners. Any other batsmen in the world would have watched the delivery go past their off stump. That's what opening batsmen did. But Slater was different. In this age of power batting it is usual to see openers smack the new ball to all parts in Test cricket. Back then, little more than a decade ago, it was as inappropriate as guitars in dance music. Openers did attrition; Slater did aggression. Openers eschewed risk; Slater calculated risk. Every time he strapped on the pads he also buckled his swash. Sometimes, inevitably, it went wrong - exactly a quarter of his dismissals were in single figures - but when it went right he was thrillingly irrepressible. Bopping around his crease on the balls of his feet, he would land savage blow after savage blow with his bullet cut shots, cover-drives and pings through midwicket. And in a team full of champions whose brilliance and braggadocio provoked such misplaced distaste, Slater was the token good cop, an infectious bundle of hyperactivity you just couldn't dislike.

Sanath Jayasuriya is widely recognised as the catalyst for the contemporary approach to opening the batting and, while he took it to the next level - his strike-rate was 10 runs above Slater's - he did not open in Test cricket until 1995-96, by which time Slater had already slashed 2596 intrepid runs at the top of the order at an average just shy of 50. He was a revolutionary, who, like Claude Makelele, Rod Laver and Christian Cullen, changed the established norms and mores of his trade. There had been attacking openers before Slater, notably Kris Srikkanth, Gordon Greenidge and Saeed Anwar, but none were as influential. In the funereal atmosphere of early 90s Test cricket, Slater arrived like a wide-eyed raver at a tea party, full of mischief, dancing feet and unfettered joie de vivre. And he was so contagious that everyone wanted to follow him.

Slater inspired a generation of openers, from Jayasuriya to Herschelle Gibbs to Michael Vaughan to Chris Gayle to Virender Sehwag, to follow suit. Even his helmet-kissing century celebrations, an impromptu gesture first aired during his unforgettable 152 at Lord's in his second Test, caught on. And yet, even though he is younger than Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne and only eight months older than Justin Langer, he has for the last six years been the forgotten man of this great Australian generation, a ghost at the feast lurking in the commentary box. If that is cruel, it also feels vaguely appropriate, for Slater could have been cricket's Jimmy Dean. He lived fast and died young, with his Test career over at the age of 31 just as his peers, such as Langer, Matthew Hayden, Damien Martyn and Adam Gilchrist, were warming up.

Part of the reason Slater is forgotten is because he has, by today's inflated currency, such an apparently ordinary average: 42.83. But in that era, of Ambrose and Walsh, Wasim and Waqar, Donald and de Villiers, even Gough and Caddick, anything over 40 was extremely impressive. Imagine the damage he would have done to Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and Saj Mahmood.

Besides, Slater's impact went way beyond the quantitative. In 1996, writing in Wisden Cricket Monthly, Scyld Berry prescribed alternative measurements by which we should appraise a batsman's worth: chiefly, the number of initiatives they have seized and the number they have lost, rather than mere average. In that, Slater was miles in credit. Unlike most great punishers, such as Viv Richards and Hayden, Slater's threat was not physical, it was psychological. He gave bowlers the fear and made their chief weapon, the new ball, something to be dreaded rather than relished. In Mark Taylor's Australian side he was the chief enforcer; the fact that 11 of his 14 centuries came in victory, and none in defeat, showed his importance.

Like all the great tone setters, Slater did his best work in the first Test of a series, when he averaged 51 and made six of his 14 centuries. On that first day against England in 1994, he was not simply content with putting the Poms on the back foot; he rammed them up against the wall with nowhere to go by caning 176. Other masterpieces include a rollicking 169 at Brisbane against Pakistan in 1999, a fearless 108 against the same opponents in Rawalpindi a year earlier (when Australia, who hadn't won a series in Pakistan for 39 years, slipped dismally to 28 for three), and a career-best 219 against Sri Lanka at Perth in 1995.

Then there was his last great assault. At Edgbaston in 2001, on the first day of another much-anticipated Ashes series, England had recovered from 191 for 9 to 294 all out in 13 delirious overs and had their tails right up. Then Slater marched out flashing his cat o' nine tails: he thrashed 18 - 18! - from Darren Gough's first over of the innings, and England realized that they were entering a world of pain for the seventh Ashes series in a row.

He went on to an 80-ball 77 but did not reach 25 again all series and was dropped for the final Test, after which Langer and Hayden formed an unimpeachable opening partnership. It was cruelly ironic that Langer, a grinder turned dasher because of the very trail that Slater had blazed, should take his place. With his marriage falling apart and a debilitating illness threatening his life, Slater did not have the strength to reverse his decline: he was dropped by New South Wales the following year and retired quietly in 2004. It was an unhappy ending, but it could not tarnish the memory of all those innings to which he provided such sensational beginnings.